Translator: Mark Wood Reviewer: Helene Batt
I'd like to talk about two things:
Technology and language.
Terence McKenna said that,
"Humanity is an extruder of technological material".
We take material with a low level of organisation,
pass it through mental filters
and output: jewels, Gospels, spaceships
and that's part of our nature.
That sounds strange, but there are other authors who talk about it.
For example, Marshall McLuhan said that, in some way,
thanks to technology we are externalising our nervous system.
The truth is that technology allows us to amplify our abilities.
Mental as much as physical.
It allows us to better understand the world and start to change it.
And that sounds strange to us
because we don't think of technology as being something natural.
If I show you this picture,
few of you would associate it with technology.
That said, it's very advanced technology.
This dam was built by beavers.
Just like when a monkey takes ants out of an ant's nest with a stick,
or when a bird builds a nest.
That's all technology.
We don't usually associate the concept of technology with nature
but we are who we are thanks to technology.
When we discovered fire or invented tools to hunt with,
we began to feed ourselves more efficiently
and this left us with more mental RAM to develop:
culture, critical thinking, religion, art...
We are who we are today thanks to technology.
It defines who we are and how we think.
McKenna also said that: "We evolve as quickly as our language,"
and that we can only understand what we can express in words.
What we can name.
To give an example, there are tribes in the Amazon
that don't have words for "yesterday" or "tomorrow".
They don't revere their ancestors, they don't plan for the winter.
They live today.
They also don't have numbers beyond: "one, two, a lot"
Seven, one hundred, fifty are all "a lot"
There are a lot of words that they don't have
and, as a result, they don't understand those concepts.
We could say that their view of the world, is completely determined by their language
and that they evolve as quickly as their language progresses.
Thanks to technology,
we are learning new languages.
Technology is allowing us to understand new things,
expand our understanding of the world around us.
For example, when we invented the telescope
our perception of ourselves changed.
We went from being the centre of the universe,
to a speck among millions of galaxies.
When we invented the microscope,
suddenly, we became the universe:
every pore containing a million cells and other living things.
Our ability to understand the world is determined
by what we know about it.
And the technology that helps us to understand all of that
is developing exponentially.
That means that it doubles every year.
Processors double in capacity every year, that's Moore's law.
Soon, a processor's capacity
will be equal to that of the entire human race.
Soon, there will be as many transistors
on the planet Earth as grains of sand.
In a way, we're cracking the code of reality.
We're learning how reality works.
Transforming it.
Modifying it.
Imagine how we would seem
to a Roman Centurian from the first century.
We're humans capable of flight.
We're humans who breath under water.
Able to generate as much energy as a bolt of lightning.
We are creating artificial intelligences
that will soon be autonomous. In other words, life.
Or the way that, for example, we're increasing our life span.
150 years ago, we lived as long as a person from 10,000 years ago:
about 35 or 40 years.
By the mid 20th century, the average was 60 years.
These days it's 90.
In ten years it'll be 150.
In twenty we'll live forever.
We're the closest to being a god
than any human or living being has ever been.
And we're starting to learn how to alter reality.
But more than that, we're also learning how to create it.
And this is the final leap.
I want to talk about a technology today,
which although it isn't new, it's been in development a few years now,
is about to change everything: virtual reality.
Of the two words "virtual reality"
I want you to remember one in particular,
and, probably, it isn't the one you expect...
Reality.
Arthur C. Clarke said that,
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
I'd like you to do an exercise,
I'd like you to look at your hand very closely for a second.
Look at it. Look at every pore, take a look at the lines,
the beads of sweat, look at the fingerprints.
And I'm willing to give up my place on the stage
to anybody who can show me, right now,
that what you're seeing isn't a very very very very advanced 3D software.
The truth is we can't.
We can't prove that: elementary particles, matter,
the sea, the sky, this stage, you...
We can't prove that we aren't somewhere else's virtual reality.
What we do, all together, is accept that this is what surrounds us,
accept that the rules are the same for everybody,
and we call this reality.
We all agree that this is reality.
But imagine if, suddenly, they invented a device that,
well, is still quite unwieldy, far from being invisible,
but is very close to being magic.
A device that, upon entering it,
even though we're sat in our living rooms,
when we approach a cliff,
it sends a command to the reptile part of the brain saying:
Don't take another step! There's danger here!
And it makes you feel vertigo.
A device that creates a reality around you
one that has: shape, colour movement, sound...
An almost magical device that allows us to do almost anything.
To be anywhere, travel anywhere, create any reality.
Human connections develop via neurotransmitters
like oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine.
The more human the connection, the more they're stimulated.
A typed letter will elicit less of a response than one written by hand.
And this, in turn, less than a phone call,
and this less than a Skype call, where we see the other person,
and this less than meeting in person, of course.
Imagine that for a Skype call,
we could generate an environment where we have the other person in front of us
and we have, what we in virtual reality call "presence."
The feeling of tricking our brain to make it think that it's there.
And that, thanks to haptic technologies, which will be developed in future,
we can feel touch.
Imagine, not just that, but imagine that I'm in there talking with my girlfriend
and an artificial intelligence scans our Instagram accounts,
detects the photos where we're happy and together
and starts to recreate around us
those places where we were happy long ago.
And beyond that, why not?
Suddenly, with a click,
I can change the evening and make it more appealing, add music...
And... Why not?
Also physically measures us...
allowing me to see how she reacts to what I say to her.
See how her body lights up as she's stimulated by a word I say or a touch.
It's really incredible.
The potential that this has is amazing.
And, I don't know if you've tried or had the chance to try virtual reality,
but speaking about it is like dancing about architecture.
It's ridiculous, can't be done. It must be experienced.
It's really amazing.
And all of a sudden, it's not the technology that's exponential
...but connections.
Our ability to do, say, think.
Imagine, for example, that you got up on a typical day
and you get up an hour later because you no longer need to drive to work,
you no longer have to waste an hour in a traffic jam.
and you connect to your office, the one you've always worked in,
with the same colleagues, overlooking Central Park.
You have a good job.
You spend the day working in the office with them
on a prototype that you can rotate above your hand
and, at some point, you need to handle something with the engineer
and you go visit his home in Hawaii and you spend some time with him in Hawaii.
And at some point your day ends and you decide to take a walk.
You take off the helmet and you're back home in Valladolid,
where the rent is much cheaper,
where you can take your child to the park, where you have a lot more time.
And during your walk, your wife calls you and says:
"Can you come and buy a dress with me for the dinner we have on Saturday?"
That being a real life dinner.
You connect and go with her to a shop where you can see an exact avatar of her,
and she can try on any dress,
any size, any colour, adjust it, change something...
She buys it after you've found the perfect dress.
She heads off and you continue your walk
And you obviously have a lot more time to enjoy the day now
because you don't need to queue at the market,
you don't need to queue at the doctors',
all of this sounds a lot like science fiction.
Actually, it's already invisible.
Think about the internet.
Before, it was something we connected to.
We sat in front of the computer, spent a few hours,
disconnected and then carried on with our lives.
These days, the internet comes with us, it's everywhere.
It's just a means, it hangs around and makes our everyday lives easier.
In this way it's the same. There will come a time when there is no difference
between virtual reality and reality reality.
Where you'll enter your virtual reality, look at your hand
and be unable to say if it's very very advanced 3D software or reality.
When you come home, your son is playing with Pedro, Juan and Buzz.
And Buzz Lightyear has the same size and shape,
and he's as real as Pedro and Juan.
and he's teaching them the names of the planets, the galaxies...
When your wife gets home, you decide to watch a film.
She'll be Angelina and you'll be Brad Pitt.
And you'll be inside the action
looking around, seeing things exploding around you
and knowing that when you look into the eyes of the other character,
the person you love will be behind them.
And if we can do all of this,
there's nothing that can stop us from doing everything we want to,
and building all of the worlds that we want to build.
Imagine a world where empathy is more important that property
because it's no longer a limited quantity.
Imagine a world where anybody who can't move, now can,
where a person who can't travel, can now travel anywhere
wherever, whenever and however.
Where creativity is increased a thousand fold
because we have all of the tools at our disposal,
where we can make anything.
And the most powerful thing about this, isn't just the idea of a device
in which we can travel,
it's the idea of it as a language,
as a new ability to understand the world differently,
to tailor a reality to ourselves,
to expand our abilities, to expand our connections.
In conclusion, what's happened with virtual reality
is that we've build a tool to learn how to say "tomorrow".
Thank you.
(Applause)